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“I’m back to the top of my black tea list!
I sipped down one last week & added 2, so now I’m at 19 unflavored blacks, with a few more on their way. As far as breakfast teas go,...”
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“Whee! Fun updates! Looks great, Steepster Overlords! (Now if we could just edit the comments we make….)
I spent my drive to work this morning pretty much doing three things: listening to...”
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“I threw in a little Irish Breakfast on top of yesterday’s leftover Keemun Concerto. Yum. This tea is comforting and heavy…malty and smokey. Fantastic for a cold, rainy and generally...”
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“It’s wednesday, my regular day off and I’ve taken the rest of the week off as well. (This, btw, has nothing to do with illness, it was already planned, so no worries there). After the...”
Read full tasting note

From Adagio Teas

A new combination of black teas from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Assam (India). As its name implies, Irish Breakfast tea is an ideal accompaniment to a morning meal. It smoothly blends the high notes of a high-grown Ceylon with the malty underscore of a hearty Assam. May be enjoyed plain or with a drop of milk. The perfect afternoon tea.

163 Tasting Notes

I’m back to the top of my black tea list!
I sipped down one last week & added 2, so now I’m at 19 unflavored blacks, with a few more on their way. As far as breakfast teas go, I’m enjoying this one today. It’s bold enough, & there’s a bit of a sweet fruity aftertaste I didn’t notice before.
Did Colin Farrell wink at me from across the table & ask for a sip? No…sigh…
So, I’m on the lookout for other Irish breakfasts (scottish, canadian) that people really love. What are your favorites?

Whee! Fun updates! Looks great, Steepster Overlords! (Now if we could just edit the comments we make….)

I spent my drive to work this morning pretty much doing three things: listening to OK Go, trying to ignore that I need to get gas (it’s literally freezing outside… I am not mentally prepared to stand out in that to pump gas) and trying to figure out what it is that this tea lacks.

I’m not saying this is a bad tea. Far from it. I quite enjoy it. I even caught a whiff of cinnamon today from the dry leaves. I tried to find that taste while drinking it, too and decided that maybe there is a hint of it on the tail end. Maybe. But anyway, I like this tea. Stout, wakes me up, but isn’t mean about it. It’s a 4/5 star for me. It’s just missing… something. Something that would give it just that little extra depth of flavor to push it into a 5/5 star tea (I am horribly stingy with 5 star ratings – out of the literally hundreds of teas I’ve tried, maybe 25 have gotten a 5).

Also this morning, I think I’ve fully figured out what malt tastes like. Others have done a great job describing it but going from acknowledging what it should taste like and really understanding what it tastes like took a few tries for me. Anyway, to me it is what comes across as a combo of bake-y and cardboard. Today I got more cardboard from this tea, but not bad cardboard. Gourmet cardboard. Not the licking-the-dirty-and-already-used-cardboard-shipping-box in-your-face-ness that I get from ROT’s Lucky Irish. This was good, clean, nice quality cardboard.

I promise, it’s not a bad thing.

But yeah. I like this tea but can’t quite love it (though it will definitely be a go-to tea for me until I find a 5-star Irish Breakfast). Now that I’ve had a chance to get to know this tea, I think I enjoy Assam Harmony more so I’ve dropped the rating just a hair to reflect that.

Love nod to gourmet cardboard. :) Definitely looking for a 5-star Irish Breakfast too! I started out with my Irish Breakfast Twinings bag tea this morning, and wondered were ALL the kick went? Disappointed was an understatement – I think I might double up next time.

It’s not bad cardboard and probably not like actually eating cardboard but there’s a dryness and a… sturdiness to it that just brings to mind the smell of a cardboard box. Weirdly. I’m guessing that my dry sturdiness is your not bitter but bitter taste. Hehe. I think taste is very hard to describe and translate because associations play into it a lot but it is fun trying!

Gourmet cardboard and bake-y…with the potential of cowbell too! I’m sold. Some of the more interesting words I’ve heard used to describe tea, good job :)

We will never let you edit your comments. You will be forever mocked for your poor grammar and lack of proofreading…bwaahahahah (evil laugh)…na, it’s on the list and coming soon. I just can’t stay mad at you :)

I threw in a little Irish Breakfast on top of yesterday’s leftover Keemun Concerto. Yum. This tea is comforting and heavy…malty and smokey. Fantastic for a cold, rainy and generally yucky day. Taken with milk and a little Truvia. Does anyone else have an opinion on this Truvia stuff? I came across it by way of my local tea shop. They have packets out on their tables with the Splenda, raw sugar, etc. Just curious if this is the latest and greatest in the world of sweeteners.

Truvia – supposed to be more pure form of Stevia. I’ve not had Truvia but I have had Stevia, and it has a horrible aftertaste. Theoretically, the processing that Truvia undergoes gets rid of the aftertaste.

i usually use Agave nectar in my teas…but if i ever use sugar i use Truvia. I never had a taste for splenda…i thought that it had that funny after taste. So when i use Truvia, i only use a half a packet and i think it tastes fine. I dont notice a yucky after taste like in splenda.

@Jillian, absolutely. Aspartame is notoriously known for making depression worse for those who suffer from it. I go w/ stevia because it’s the only natural calorie free option… although honey is very healthy for you. I’d love to try ROT’s honeys w/ tea in them.

@cofftea, is it your mission each day to get on here and piss on and irritate people on purpose? I have read sooooo many of your comments to people that are just rude. Does this make u feel good or what?

It’s wednesday, my regular day off and I’ve taken the rest of the week off as well. (This, btw, has nothing to do with illness, it was already planned, so no worries there). After the restorative power of yesterday’s Assam, I felt like giving this on the that TeaEqualsBliss sent me.
I didn’t really find any aroma to speak off, but my nose feels a bit like it’s considering acting up a little bit, so I don’t fully trust my sense of smell. I don’t think it’s all there at the moment.

The flavour, however, reveals the cardboard-y note of Assam. I probably wouldn’t really have picked that one out so easily if it hadn’t been for yesterday’s Assam and the revelation that was the cardboard note. (Sometimes I feel like I’m nicking all of Auggy’s words, but they’re such good words!).

It also has a surprising sweetness. Smooth, almost creamy. I’m not the sort of person to put milk in anything, even if it is recommended to me. I always try it plain first, and usually that’s the way I’ll drink it. Milk is an added occasional luxury. Maybe that’s why, to me, it doesn’t take very much for a tea to taste like it already had a drop of milk in it.

Maybe it’s some sort of phantom flavour. Like phantom pains where a patient may still feel the sensations of the amputated limb. I can almost taste the flavour that isn’t there. Or something.

It’s not really something that I would connect with a Ceylon, though, so I think that’s because of how the blend is coming together.

Funny thing is that if I were to break this apart and have the Assam on its own and the Ceylon on its own, then I don’t really think I would be more then fleetingly impressed with either of them. But together it’s a different story and they come together quite well.

I have a good amount of this and it could easily become one of my stable teas, but I have put the Irish Morning Tea from A C Perch’s on my shopping list for when I run out. The European Adagio shop carries the Irish Breakfast, but I thought it would be nice to get some comparison and some
different perspective on it. (Besides A C Perch’s is probably quicker and cheaper for me, what with being a danish company. Especially since I’m shopping there anyway)

Of course I had to add the A C Perch’s blend to the site first, and then I unleashed the full force of OCD on the A C Perch’s teas already in the database. They all have pictures and proper descriptions now, except the one that I couldn’t seem to find. (I hope I didn’t accidentally step on anybody’s toes with this) I even discovered that the genmaicha I had from them wasn’t their genmaicha at all, but a variation. The things you learn…

Nick away! It makes me feel loved! :) Lena sent me some of this a while back (sadly all gone now) and I really liked it. It’s a good blend, I think – and soooo much better than Republic of Tea’s IB (at least for me) – and is the one that made me feel daring enough to start getting more into stout breakfast blends! (Though I still love my Chinese blacks)

I saw your Scottish one. :) I seem to recall having seen a French and a Russian one around the place a while ago. It would be cool if someone would do a breakfast blend sampler set. I haven’t tried RoT yet, except I think possibly a single bag from swaps and such, so I can’t compare there. Once upon a time I had a few bags of IB from Twinings, but they were bagged, and I can’t really remember what they were like. Also that was before I learned to properly taste what I was drinking.
I hope A C Perch’s can live up to this one.

Ooh, I like the breakfast blend sampler set idea. I don’t know why I’ve become such a sucker for breakfast blends but I have. I thought Golden Moon’s Irish Breakfast was particularly yummy. And Samovar’s English Breakfast was good, too. Most breakfast blends I’ve run across though tend to be on the meh side of good. But there are good ones out there (like this IB!) so I hope AC Perch’s will be one of the awesome ones!

I haven’t yet managed to find a truly yummy EB. Shame AC Perch’s doesn’t offer samples. I have to get 100g minimum from them. They have, however, been fairly consistently a good experience for me. GM and Samovar are both out of reach for me, so I can’t try theirs. But hey, maybe I’ll get lucky when the TTB returns to me. ;)

True. :) This one made me about ready to start searching properly. I wish I had the opportunity and means to get a sample of a load of different ones and set up an entire sampling array of EBs. I’d have to buy a load of tiny teapots too! What’s not to love?! :D

This one is a totally decent IB. I have been in a Breakfast tea mode too! Irish, English, 2 different types of China Breakfast…
I’m waiting on my Samovar order to try their Breakfast blend. I have high hopes.

Maybe that’s the newest trend? Breakfast Buffet? I had one, Auggy had one, JacquelineM had one and you’re in the mood for it too. And I’m currently having the genmaicha-that-wasn’t-the-genmaicha, which is almost breakfast-y. :)

Lena, I’ve only broken into Samovar’s Breakfast blend once but I keep craving it so I think it’s pretty good! (I’m trying to stretch it out a little though and get rid of some other teas, thus just the one visit with it so far).

Preparation

I got some of this from ever-awesome Lena in a swap and I decided to start my morning off with it. However, I’m going to have to leave a rating off of it because my morning also involved reading for a class and, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to pay very much attention to the tea.

I’m going to try it at a shorter steep time next go round because this was a little bitter for me. It had a slight smokiness to it and an even slighter sweetness at the finish. In some aspects, it nearly reminded me of coffee, but the flavor wasn’t as full and it didn’t have that roasted quality that I usually get from coffee. I also didn’t get any maltiness from it, which I was expecting to at least get a hint of.

But anyway, this could all be for nought because I really wasn’t doing a good job of paying attention and, let’s be real, if acoustical wave forms are actually able to hold my attention in the morning I need to let that ride.

What I can say with certainty is that the caffeine didn’t take very long to kick in and I was feeling antsy before long, which began to disrupt my reading kick a bit so I didn’t finish the cup. Caffeine jitters and being snowed in do not mix very well – especially when you’ve been cooped up in the house for almost a week.

No, wait, it’s actually been a full week now. I have literally been stuck in the house for an entire week. Our street still hasn’t been plowed. The tea I was supposed to get in two days ago has been delayed yet again because of “adverse weather conditions” [this being the order that includes my greatly anticipated Caramelized Pear]. Steepsterites, I am going to lose my mind if these roads do not become drivable very soon.

So thanks for the tea, Lena! Sorry this entry bites pretty hard. I’ll try to get some better thoughts down next time. In the interim, have some snow pictures.http://bit.ly/aHprnD

@Shanti Yeah, it’s pretty, but a bit of a bummer as the plows are too tied up to do a lot of the residential areas. Too much snow – no place to put it! Government’s been shut down a few days…craziness.

@sophistre Thanks so much! I like color, so I usually end up overcompensating a tad in post-processing. Hee. I hope I get to escape, too, for the sake of my dwindling mental health!

I know what your going through. Here in Maine we have had many storms like you have experienced over the past week. Stay in and drink more tea. We didn’t get any snow at all from the storms and we are equipped to deal with it. Go figure.

@Jillian Oh, I have! Trust. Broke out some boots that were made for stomping. Even went sledding with the kids the other day. It’s just not the same! http://bit.ly/c1CgFN

@Dan Haha! I think that this article hilariously sums up how well we deal with snow. http://bit.ly/a5lDYm

@Heyes Haha, Steepsterites, Steepers, Steeps, Steepsters…I think they all work! Maybe we can start four very confusingly named gangs. When you’re a Steep, you’re a Steep all the way. And the New England weather is exactly why I’m not planning on moving any farther North than here. And it gets too muggy for me in the South. Guess I’ll have to go out West! OH WELL!

Upped the rating on this one. As tomorrow is St. Paddy’s Day, and I am full-blooded Irish (maiden name is Fitzpatrick), I thought this was apropos. This is a brisk wake-up cuppa, which I need on this grimy gray day.

Not so much a tasting note, but this is the tea in my cup at the moment.

Should have seen it coming- one child gets a stomach bug & the other is bound to get it as well. Especially when they’re attached at the hip. Our 3yr old spent all yesterday throwing up, so it looks like I’ll be putting off trying the rest of my tea samples for at least a couple more days. At least until I can get the carpets thoroughly scrubbed and the apartment back to smelling clean and fresh >.< Can’t properly sample tea if you can’t smell it!

this is a very middle of the road average ordinary every day tea. Nothing much going on, but nothing to offend either. I’d drink it, but i wouldn’t order it since there are many more fabulous irish breakfast teas out there that make for a little more OOMPH in my day :)

boxermana…these days it’s a little of that lol mostly because i have so many small samples from terriharplady. I try to mix them up with the occasional none sipdown as well though. IE the other week when i did butiki teas heh

Finally got around to making a pot. I haven’t had this tea in several years, and I feel like my tastes have matured since then. But naturally, I’m going to like an assam/ceylon blend.

It’s a good tea, don’t get me wrong. It’s strong and a little bitter, but it just doesn’t have a lot going on. I guess I’m starting to lean more toward Chinese black teas? Or maybe I’m just having an off night. I’ll give it another try before I consider my rating final.